The early days:
FitSpring dates back to Christmas 2012. Brian’s family was eating Christmas dinner and Yvonne, aged 77 at the time moaned about her struggle to get her socks on. Luckily Brian was a strength and conditioning coach who owned a CrossFit gym and had 15 years experience teaching functional exercise. This started Brian and his mum Yvonne (grudgingly) working together to improve her strength, fitness, stability and mobility.
Yvonne had never been in a gym and never been coached. The last time she partook of physical exercise was skiing in France in the 1950s. The process of teaching Yvonne how to move became a bonding experience as we now had something in common.
This led to a decade long training journey that only stopped because of the Covid lockdowns. Following Government advice to isolate, the lack of movement, strength training, engagement and community took its toll on Yvonne. She went from being a healthy adult moving normally to a shuffling old lady with hip and knee problems and early stage Alzheimers. It is hard to say how much of her hip, knee and brain degeneration issues are due to stopping training, but this certainly didn’t help.
Post lockdown we restarted training but things are much more challenging.
It is hard to know if her strength and fitness training is helping to hold back the Alzheimers. She recently aced her Doctor’s interview to keep her driving licence (she’s not driving any more, don’t worry) and is getting a measurable increase in cardiovascular fitness week on week. Strength numbers are way down on her peak, but she has just had a hip replaced.
